Facebook Agrees to Buy LiveRail to Add Video-Advertising Tools

Facebook Inc. agreed to acquire LiveRail, a startup that helps business buy more relevant video advertisements.

Terms weren’t disclosed. The deal, disclosed in a blog post today, is part of Facebook’s push to offer better video ads around the Web. The company earlier this year started offering TV-like promotional clips on its social network.

Facebook and Internet rivals such as Google Inc. and Twitter Inc. have made a string of acquisitions in recent months to add tools for marketers. San Francisco-based LiveRail lets companies and organizations improve targeting for video ads, automatically raising and lowering the price they’re willing to pay for a spot based on changing data about the audience.

“We believe that LiveRail, Facebook and the premium publishers it serves have an opportunity to make video ads better and more relevant for the hundreds of millions of people who watch digital video every month,” Brian Boland, a vice president at Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, said in the blog post. “Publishers will benefit as well because more relevant ads will help them make the most out of every opportunity they have to show an ad.”